Submitted Photo
Kids at Jackson Primary School will return to a surprise landscape inside the hallway this fall.
Based on the “KEY” principles of kindness, empathy and you, artist Linda Fix painted a large swath of artistic scenery this past month.
Principal Maureen Notaro had already instilled the concept of community helpers at the school, such as police officers, firefighters and doctors, which reminded Fix of the familiar phrase “it takes a village.”
She wanted to add the American flag to her design and talked to Notaro about what she wanted to incorporate.
“She really wanted children in it. She loved the flags, one of the American flags in it, so I went and designed it. And my designs are an interesting process because they never end up quite the way they begin, and that's what I love about art and creativity,” Fix said to The Batavian. “It never ends really the way you had it in your mind. But you get a piece of it, you know, you can recognize it. But along the way, so many things change.
"As I'm painting, children walk by, and they say things they love, and I catch their favorite colors, and I ask them, what would you like to see in the picture and the painting? And they tell me flowers over here. And they'll point to an area, so I'll paint their favorite color, rather, in a flower," she said. "So it became a journey for me.”
Fix applied for and was awarded a $5,000 grant from GO Art! for the project. It’s the second of its kind for a mural in a city school. The first one was at John Kennedy Intermediate last year.
Fix credits former school employee Julia Rogers and GO Art! staffer Mary Jo Whitman for helping to coordinate the efforts, and wanted to give a shout-out to Sherwin-Williams of Batavia for a generous sampling of paint in just the right blue shades she needed.
After getting a sense of what Notaro wanted to see on the Jackson school walls, Fix then got to work. She chalked an outline of her design, which she began in late June of this year. There was a lapse for some vacation between then and when she really began the serious work in mid-July.
“I worked on it every day until (Thursday), for three or four hours a day, on the entire wall,” she said. “Maureen is a very ambitious principal; she's a very forward principal, and I love that about her. She said, hey, can we add a rainbow at the end of it with the sun and do it in metallic, she loved my metallic paint, so I put that there, and then in the front foyer, I also did another rainbow, because then they can hang the children's different artwork and things like that around it.
“So it kind of added a little bit to the timeframe for me,” she said. “But, you know, it was okay. I was fine with it. I have enjoyed painting it so much, and so has the community.”
Last year she then made contact with folks that arranged for a traveling mural of the artwork. That involved a professional photographer and transferring the art onto a huge 8-foot-by-8-foot piece of canvas that is displayed on an easel and transported around the district.
A traveling mural will be part of this year’s grant, and it will be forthcoming by the end of the year," she said.
Although kindness is widely taught in schools now, she said, it seems as though empathy is not as well known, which is why she favors that second word in the acronym of KEY.
“Because empathy isn’t something we teach,” she said. “How do we teach children to really understand that?”
The traveling mural is to help educate kids on that empathy component, she said. Last year there were also children’s workshops along with the traveling mural, and those details have to be worked out for this year, Fix said. She thinks the traveling part of the project will probably be out and about in October or November.
Asked about her favorite part of this year’s mural, Fix thought to the day her grandson Waylon accompanied her to school. He thoughtfully watched and observed her splash on colors and a continuing story before offering his own suggestion. There were children, a wise owl, school buses, white clouds, a blue sky, rolling hills, and math equations, but something was missing, he told her.
“He said you need a park in here. And he picked where it should go, and it was his idea,” she said of her 9-year-old artist-in-training. “And I would never have thought of a park. It has evergreen trees, and children are sitting on a rock.”
When Fix was taking art lessons, she told her teacher she wanted to paint billboards someday, and the male teacher scoffed, “Miranda, you can’t do that,” referring to her artist pseudonym, Miranda Fix.
Now, having just completed another project doing something that she loves in the hallway for hundreds of children to see, she may have accomplished that billboard after all. What is a billboard if not an artful display of thoughts?
Come Sept. 5, many youngsters will be treated to that once they enter Jackson.
“That'll be a surprise when the children come back in. We have a lot of hidden things, a lot of hidden gems,” she said. “We represented everyone. We tried to represent the janitors in the school, we tried to represent numbers, and the big clock you see has all the community helpers, symbols of community helpers in the clock. So, yeah, there's a lot of just little thoughts.”
